Adding AgTech to Agriculture extension
Thiago Terzi
Scaling Global Organizations through Digital Transformation, Data Democratization, and Analytic Empowerment
Agricultural extension is the application of scientific research and knowledge to agricultural practices through farmers education. Agricultural extension plays a crucial role in boosting agricultural productivity, increasing food security, improving rural livelihoods, and promoting agriculture as an engine of pro-poor economic growth.
Extension in many countries is the only access a farmer has to the rest of the value chain. It provides a critical support service for rural producers meeting the new challenges confronting agriculture.
Unfortunately AgTech is rarely included in the educational offering and when it is, more often than not it carries a BIASED commercial weight.
Agriculture is the largest unsupervised factory in the world. Its private nature has historically created information arbitrage by moving the opportunities into organizations with deeper access to supply chain data. While the current revolution will be slowly reducing some of those differences by directly connecting producers and consumers it is the technology arbitrage that is of most concern.
For the Agriculture community to evolve We need to DEMOCRATIZE technology knowledge ! If you are an organization servicing farmers LET'S CONNECT.
For the last 200 years, farmers have had access to their own practice "CURATORS". Lets DEMOCRATIZE TECHNOLOGY KNOWLEDGE with the goal of augmenting the extension agent's knowledge capability while supporting farmers transition into a 21st century business.
Thiago Terzi is the founder of The Commodity Innovation Lab, a collaborative think tank that marries deep rooted Agriculture expertise, technology and data science to help organizations bridge their technology gap.